Every semester, college students walk the aisles of their school’s bookstore. They wander between shelves of $200 math textbooks and psychology books more expensive than a month’s groceries, searching for copies they may never even open.
From 1977 to 2015, the price of college textbooks skyrocketed 1,041%. Sixty-five percent of students reported not buying all required course reading because it was too expensive, according to a 2014 report for the Public Research Institute Groups.
But when students step into the bookstore at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, they find many books offered for less than $40. Those books are thanks to the college’s independently run Chemeketa Press.
Since its 2015 launch, the press has printed 33 titles and saved students more than $2.5 million.
In one case, a textbook for an art appreciation course — a class that helps students meet a humanities requirement— used to cost $200.
Today it costs $36.50. Not only are students saving money, but by using a textbook created by the instructor, they gain insight into local artists and a new definition of what art appreciation means.
The school’s administration set out to make sure the cost of a book never deterred someone from taking a class. In 2015, using grant funding and school support, the college opened the press. They collaborate with instructors to write the textbooks, and after students and faculty revise and edit, the final product is sent to print.
At community colleges, where students are more likely to be low-income, the money saved can influence student success and graduation rates.
Brian Mosher, the managing editor of Chemeketa Press, told NationSwell that he loves “the idea of comparing the money a student saves on a textbook with what they could do with that money instead.”
It might mean working fewer hours at a job or taking out smaller loans. For some, the money saved could be put toward taking an extra class, moving that student one step closer to graduation.
While cost savings was what launched Chemeketa Press, faculty and administration also saw it as an opportunity to create more effective books.
Instead of jumping from chapter eight to chapter 23, then back to chapter 14, or using books filled with jargon and confusing syntax, instructors write books that follow their course outline. Classroom testing and evaluation can take years to complete in traditional publishing. For a Chemeketa Press book, it only takes a few months and revisions can be added when there’s a reprint. Instructors are paid for their time and have the chance to become published writers.
“We’re not looking to change the way the class is taught, we’re looking to replace a book and teach the same class,” he said.
But Mosher said the instructors aren’t doing it for the compensation or author credit. They’re doing it to save their students money.
“Most of the faculty who end up with their name on the cover of a book, that’s just a bonus,” Mosher said. “They’re saying they have passion for their students, they want their students to succeed, and they see the hardship of expensive textbooks.”
And the textbooks work. Through institutional research, Chemeketa Press compared the passing percentages of an intermediate algebra class. With the same instructor, one class used the traditional, $140 textbook and another used Chemeketa Press’ $36 book.
Each class had the same passing rate, Mosher said.
“This book can hold water next to [one from] the professional, big time, commercial publisher,” Mosher said.
Professors can connect with Chemeketa Printing Press on its website, where five textbooks are available for purchase through its site. Chemeketa Press is also partnering with other colleges to help students save money by getting these books in their hands.
Mosher said the goal is to create a self-sustaining model that other community colleges across the nation can adopt.
“That’s our long-term, big dream,” Mosher said. “We think any community college across the country can do this.”
More: For Prisoners, Reading Is so Much More Than a Pastime — It’s a Way to Change Their Lives
Tag: college
5 Ways Colleges Help Single Parents Earn Degrees
For roughly a quarter of American college students — 4.8 million of them, to be exact — life is more than just textbooks, beer and all-night philosophical discussions. Instead, their college experience comes with a side of baby books, bottles and the need for extra childcare during finals. It’s a challenging scenario, and for those raising kids without a partner, the time, dedication and money needed to graduate is even more acute. As of 2012, there were 2.1 million single moms enrolled in college, a number that has doubled since 1999. What’s more, only 28 percent of them complete their degrees within six years.
The good news is that some colleges and universities have created innovative programs to help students with kids, particularly single mothers, earn bachelor degrees, which in turn greatly improves their prospects for financial security. Their efforts can be used as a model for other institutions that want to increase the assistance given to the student-parents in their ranks.
FAMILY HOUSING OPTIONS
It’s tremendously easier to get to class when you’re living right on campus. That goes double for those students who have to juggle getting themselves and their children out the door in the mornings. The College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Neb., is just one of a handful of schools that has dedicated a portion of its campus housing to student-parents, opening its $10 million Madonna Hall in 2012 to provide housing for up to 48 single mothers, with free laundry services and play areas for their kids. And parenting students at Misericordia University in Dallas, Penn., who have school-age kids can take advantage of a bus line that runs from the university’s free year-round housing to local elementary and high schools.
CHILDCARE SUPPORT
Though the number of on-campus daycare facilities has decreased to less than half of all public institutions, there are still plenty of options for the student-parent. For example, at Minneapolis’s St. Catherine University, the young children of student-parents in the Access and Success Program can attend a Montessori early-education program, and the university keeps a list of on-campus students available for baby-sitting. St. Catherine also provides access to dedicated lactation rooms, as does the University of Iowa and the University of Washington.
SPECIAL SCHOLARSHIPS AND GRANTS
According to a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 88 percent of single parents in college have incomes at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. For these students, receiving financial assistance is critical. At Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., about 90 nontraditional students, including single mothers under the age of 25, are enrolled as Frances Perkins Program scholars each year, with 25 of them receiving full-tuition scholarships. Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business in Provo, Utah, offers scholarships to single-parent undergraduate and graduate students, both mothers and fathers. Wilson College, an all-girls school in central Pennsylvania, doles out 13 scholarships to single parents with children between the ages of 20 months and 12 years. And in addition to offering grants of up to $8,600 to parenting students, the University of California–Berkeley’s Bear Pantry, which exclusively serves student parents, provides them a two-week food supply along with a $30 gift card for fresh produce, meat or dairy.
KID-FRIENDLY FUN
While financial help and on-campus childcare are invaluable to single-parent students, so too are activities and dedicated spaces to keep their kids happy and occupied. At Misericordia, students’ kids can attend summer and sports camps, learn to swim, and visit the on-campus children’s garden and library. Likewise, Wilson College offers trips to Hershey Park for the hardworking families in its Single Parent Scholar Program. And the Children’s Center at Indiana University Southeast provides structured daycare that combines classroom learning with outdoor recreation, games and storytime.
WRAPAROUND SUPPORT SERVICES
To help parent-students succeed, some schools have fully integrated programs that provide not just childcare and housing, but also counseling services and parenting workshops. The Keys to Degrees Program at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., offers year-round campus housing, childcare placement and subsidies, scholarship support, tutoring, mentoring and parenting-skills courses. Endicott pioneered the program and, through grants, has expanded it to schools including Portland State, Eastern Michigan, Dillard University and others. And it’s working: Seventy-four percent of Keys to Degrees participants have earned a bachelor’s degree, and 92 percent of graduates since 2013 are now working in a field related to their course of study. In addition, the College of Saint Mary has a dedicated employee that helps moms find pediatricians and, if needed, legal aid. Its Mothers Living & Learning program offers workshops in parenting strategies, and a student group called MOMS (Many Opportunities for Mothering Solo) plans fun-filled events for mothers and their kids.
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The goal of these programs and others is simple: Make life easier on the single parent who wants to study. As Autumn Green, the director of Endicott’s student-parents program, recently put it, “We try to look for students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to attend college. Students get a lot from the program, but they’re also giving a lot to the program. They’re making an investment in their future. They have skin in the game.”
Homepage photo by by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
The Simple Way to Keep Struggling College Students in Check
One morning last summer, Zulmaly Ramirez, an academic advocate who advises undergraduates at the University of South Florida, logged on to her computer and saw a notification that a new freshman was at risk of dropping out. The student, an off-campus commuter, hadn’t been signing in to the course portal, where reading assignments are posted, and his grades were slipping, the software showed. Ramirez asked the young man to stop by.
In person, the teen confirmed exactly what the computer program’s algorithm had predicted. His half-hour drive to campus made him feel removed from the other students, he had yet to decide on a major, and he had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Ramirez proposed some quick fixes. She introduced him to the ultimate Frisbee team, helped him settle on a business track and personally walked him to the counseling center to make his first appointment.
Ramirez’s intervention can be credited to Civitas Learning, a software company that sorts reams of student data to warn counselors, in real time, which students are in the greatest danger of dropping out — before the semester has ended and grades have been posted. The company, based in Austin, Texas, also has programs designed to help students pick classes and allow administrators to track what impact they have on student performance.
Civitas, which has contracts with Texas A&M, the University of Arizona, Penn State University, Morehouse College and hundreds of others, has pledged to boost graduation rates by 1 million more students each year, before 2025. (Economists predict America must add up to 23 million skilled college grads to its increasingly tech-centric workforce, by 2025, to be globally competitive.) The company plans to reach that goal by completely revamping the function of advisers in higher education.
“Most students’ relationship with their adviser is fairly transactional. ‘What are the classes that I have to take next?’ And, ‘How do I enroll?’ Unfortunately, the conversation is hurried and infrequent,” says Charles Thornburgh, one of Civitas’s two co-founders. “Hopefully in the future, more tools will provide more personalized recommendations to students, with both the student and adviser coming in dramatically better informed about where the student is on the journey to success.”
Previously, most college advising departments merely guessed who might not graduate on time. These counselors often based their speculation on whether a student was meeting traditional markers of success, like a high grade point average — a policy backed up by intuition, not evidence. Civitas, by contrast, starts with a review of a college’s historical data to detect which factors recur among dropouts, a more accurate way to develop a school-specific predictor.
Often, the results of this analysis surprise even veteran administrators. One of Civitas’s recent findings, for example, showed that GPAs were nearly meaningless when correlated with retention rates. A student with a 2.0 was no more likely to quit than a high achiever with a 4.0. Rather, the surest sign a kid wouldn’t make it was his grade in a freshman writing course.
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Using Civitas, an administrator can easily see which students are thinking of quitting. They can also test how well an intervention can reverse a downward trend. Armed with a vast archive of historical data, Civitas’s software first digs up the records of past students with similar circumstances. Then, it analyzes how intervening would change the students’ learning trajectory, compared to the past. “There’s an opportunity there for educators and administrators, who’ve been operating in the dark forever,” he adds. “They can become more scientific.”
Of course, there’s a danger in placing too much faith in numbers. In the wrong hands, predictive analytics in education might divert resources (or deny college admission) from students who are careening toward failure anyway. But Civitas maintains that its approach is intended to direct help to those students who need it most, not to take it away from their classmates. Thornburgh notes that the education system already relies on an insidious predictive model. Fixed characteristics like family wealth, race and gender are seen as factors in student success — inherent conditions that, Thornburgh points out, can’t be changed or reversed. Luckily, as he’s found in his research, demographics aren’t the best way to predict who stays in school. “How students engage while on campus is dramatically more important than anything else, and that’s what really drives our model.”
Civitas emphasizes its role as a tool to support more personal academic advising. After the software flags a student, the intervention comes from a counselor, not a machine. “With our freshmen, even though they do use their phones and technology a lot, I’m always surprised by how much they enjoy just sitting down for 30 minutes or an hour,” says Ramirez. “I see students change dramatically when they have a meeting face-to-face, rather than receive alerts on their phones.” Especially when isolation drives disengagement, that human interaction can go a long way.
So far, it seems to be working. At the University of South Florida, retention rates that had plateaued for years finally surpassed 90 percent this year, reports Paul Dosal, vice provost for student success. And while the data’s not in yet, he expects that USF will finally crack a 70 percent graduation rate very soon, a huge step as the college looks to boost its prominence.
Across academia, researchers spend plenty of time conducting research in the humanities, sociology and the hard sciences. But they too rarely turn that critical eye to assessing the best way to teach the degree-seekers in their own lecture halls. With Civitas, these professors and administrators can begin to study themselves.
“There’s a lot of capital, time and energy spent on educating students, and we should find a way to make sure that we keep getting better at it,” Thornburgh says. “As educators, we have to learn from each other and every student’s journey.”
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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016
The most contentious presidential election in modern history offered Americans abundant reasons to shut off the news. But if they looked past the front page’s daily jaw-droppers, our countrymen would see that there’s plenty of inspiring work being done. At NationSwell, we strive to find the nonprofit directors, the social entrepreneurs and the government officials testing new ways to solve America’s most intractable problems. In our reporting this year, we’ve found there’s no shortage of good being done. Here’s a look at our favorite solutions from 2016.
This Woman Has Collected 40,000 Feminine Products to Boost the Self-Esteem of Homeless Women
Already struggling to afford basic necessities, homeless women often forgo bras and menstrual hygiene products. Dana Marlowe, a mother of two in the Washington, D.C., area, restored these ladies’ dignity by distributing over 40,000 feminine products to the homeless before NationSwell met her in February. Since then, her organization Support the Girls has given out 212,000 more.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Joseph McGill, a Civil War re-enactor and history consultant for Charleston’s Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, believes we must not forget the history of slavery and its lasting impact to date. To remind us, he’s slept overnight in 80 dilapidated cabins — sometimes bringing along groups of people interested in the experience — that once held the enslaved.
This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
Abandoned by an abusive dad and a mentally ill mom, Pamela Bolnick was placed into foster care at 6 years old. For a time, the system worked — that is, until she “aged out” of it. Bolnick sought help from First Place for Youth, an East Bay nonprofit that provides security deposits for emancipated children to transition into stable housing.
Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change if One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
Café Momentum, one of Dallas’s most popular restaurants, is staffed by formerly incarcerated young men without prior culinary experience. Owner Chad Houser says the kitchen jobs have almost entirely eliminated recidivism among his restaurant’s ranks.
This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Nearly three decades before Rolling Stone published its incendiary (and factually inaccurate) description of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a gang rape occurred at the University of New Hampshire in 1987. Choosing the right ways to respond to the crisis, the public college has since become the undisputed leader in ending sex crimes on campus.
This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown
Once a commercial fisherman, Bren Smith now employs a more sustainable way to draw food from the ocean. Underwater, near Thimble Island, Conn., he’s grown a vertical farm, layered with kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters.
This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences
Jason Hernandez was never supposed to leave prison. At age 21, a federal judge sentenced him to life for selling crack cocaine in McKinney, Texas — Hernandez’s first criminal offense. After President Obama granted him clemency in 2013, he’s advocated on behalf of those still behind bars for first-time, nonviolent drug offenses.
Eliminating Food Waste, One Sandwich (and App) at a Time
In 2012, Raj Karmani, a Pakistani immigrant studying computer science at the University of Illinois, built an app to redistribute leftover food to local nonprofits. So far, the nonprofit Zero Percent has delivered 1 million meals from restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets to Chicago’s needy. In recognition of his work, Karmani was awarded a $10,000 grant as part of NationSwell’s and Comcast NBCUniversal’s AllStars program.
Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
Last year, someone in Baltimore died from an overdose every day: 393 in total, more than the number killed by guns. Dr. Leana Wen, the city’s tireless public health commissioner, issued a blanket prescription for naloxone, which can reverse overdoses, to every citizen — the first step in her ambitious plan to wean 20,000 residents off heroin.
How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project
Up until 1974, a streetcar made daily trips from El Paso, Texas, across the Mexican border to Ciudad Juárez. Recently, a public art project depicting fake ads for the trolley inspired locals to call for the line’s comeback, and the artist behind the poster campaign now sits on the city council.
Continue reading “10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016”
This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
When selecting a college from which to announce a new sexual assault awareness campaign in 2011, the White House had an easy choice. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan both arrived in Durham, N.H., the New England town that’s home to the University of New Hampshire’s flagship campus, to kick off Not Alone. The year prior, Biden hosted three UNH professors for a reception at his Delaware home, and in a 42-minute speech on campus, the former senator praised them for their work: “You guys are doing it right. You’re the model for the country,” said Biden, who introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990. “I wish all colleges had a little more UNH Wildcat in them.”
Renowned among policy wonks and feminists alike for its bystander intervention program, its research institute on violence against women and its independently-funded rape prevention and crisis center, UNH is an undisputed leader in ending sexual assault on campus. But this public school with 12,500 undergrads wasn’t always ahead of the curve. In February 1987, three upperclassmen repeatedly had sex with an intoxicated freshman female in her dorm, Stoke Hall — a story that matches contemporary accounts about rapes at the University of Montana at Missoula, Florida State University and many more schools. What’s different about UNH is that faculty and students responded to that crisis as an opportunity to eradicate sexual violence. As a result, it’s a standout amongst institutions of higher learning.
Over three bitterly cold days this February, exactly 29 years after the Stoke Hall incident, NationSwell spoke with Wildcats on campus about what encourages UNH students to intervene if a sexual assault looks imminent. Both students and faculty report that, over time, the gradual changes to campus culture snowballed into a strong ethic of condemning rape when classmates notice its signs. But UNH still isn’t satisfied with those results, citing the 23 students who reported being raped in 2014, according to federal data. To maintain its reputation as a leader, the school continues to better its campus-wide outreach to prevent sexual assault.
With, as of now, 175 open federal investigations into colleges’ compliance with Title IX (the federal law on gender discrimination), universities nationwide are introducing speeches that read like disclaimers, lengthy consent policies and online sex ed courses — many developed by a cottage industry to keep schools in compliance with the law. These additions may stave off government investigators, but they haven’t necessarily been proven to keep students safe, says Jane Stapleton, co-director of UNH’s Prevention Innovations Research Center (PIRC) which studies ways to end gender-based violence, including sexual assault, relationship abuse and stalking, and is located on the college’s campus. At UNH, “we don’t subscribe to that. That is not what we’re about,” she declares; instead, the school has developed evidence-based solutions that are proven to stop rape. “Whenever someone says [their prevention education is] evidence-based, I say, ‘Show me the evidence,” Stapleton adds. “Let’s see the studies.”
Stapleton emphasizes results because she’s seen the ugly damage sexual assault can do. In 1987, as a graduate student in sociology, she watched the Stoke Hall incident unfold in the press and a public tribunal held over four evenings in a 170-seat lecture hall. At the open hearing, all three men were cleared of sexual assault charges. (Two of the three were suspended for six months on related charges, and both later pled guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault in criminal court.) After the university’s decision, vocal confrontations broke out on the wooded, snow-carpeted campus, including a mass of protestors forcefully occupying the dean’s office, hanging a “Help Wanted” sign from a flagpole, which functioned both a joke about replacing the dean and a serious cry for administrators to recognize the problems. When the students refused to vacate the office, 11 Wildcats were arrested, according to news reports at the time.
Witnessing the seething anger on campus, Gordon Haaland, then university president, penned an apologetic letter to the student body just before summer break, saying he’d return to campus “ready to examine our moral behavior.” The following fall, administrators presented a plan to address sexual assault, the first steps that would grow into UNH’s current success. Haaland, administered a campus climate survey, which found that within the first six months of the 1987-88 school year, 37 percent of UNH’s women experienced unwanted sexual contact and 10 percent were raped, and males reported 11 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
Haaland also hired a full-time rape services coordinator, who beefed up the immediate services available to survivors, supplementing an underground, grassroots effort started by UNH faculty and staff a decade prior in 1978, according to current staff. That program would grow into SHARPP (Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program), one of the only rape crisis centers located on a college campus that receives independent funding. It also has the distinction of being among the earliest, says Amy Culp, its current director. In the mid-1970s, “there was a big movement [against] domestic violence. Sexual assault didn’t come into the scene really until the early 90s,” she notes, meaning that SHARPP had a two-decade head start, allowing it to mature into the seven full-time staff (including one coordinator for male victims) and 90 volunteers it has today.
For five years, Stapleton provided direct services for rape survivors at SHARPP, including a yearlong stint as its director, before transitioning into research, where she collaborated with three colleagues (Victoria Banyard, Mary Moynihan and Elizabeth Plante, another former SHARPP director), who were using a 2002 National Institute of Justice grant to independently test a new prevention program, Bringing in the Bystander, on UNH’s student body.
The model’s experimental trial at UNH found that students who received three 90-minute training sessions showed significant increases in their willingness to intervene. “Perceived confidence goes up. We do see shifts in their attitudes in terms of, ‘I have a responsibility. I feel like I have a role to play in addressing these issues on my campus,’” says Banyard, a researcher at PIRC. After a two-month check-in, students had also reported more instances where they intervened, although “what’s trickier is figuring out how to link that to reported rates of assault,” Banyard says. Because only a handful of survivors bring their case to university administrators or police, sexual assault is “a hidden crime,” making it tough to measure changes without an established baseline, she adds.
Bringing in the Bystander would be the first rigorously evaluated prevention program on campus — eventually informing today’s “You Can Help” campaign, which is run independently by SHARPP. Drawing on its best elements, as well as those from several other renowned prevention programs (including the athlete-centric Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) and the more emotional Green Dot, a program developed at the University of Kentucky), the messaging of “You Can Help,” is simple, presenting options for what students can do, rather than lecturing them on what they can’t. “We go into classrooms and say, ‘You can help by calling the police. You can help by taking your friend home. You can help by not leaving a friend at a party. You can help by being an advocate,’” says Culp.
SHARPP’s staff teaches workshops on these lessons to students. After running through the causes, prevalence and impacts of rape on campus — “the ‘why’ we do this work,” Culp says — the instructor explains how a person can change the statistics as an active bystander. Rather than watching a very drunk girl be carried into a bedroom, for instance, a bystander should check in to see if the woman wants to go back to her own room instead. Instructors tell stories of interventions that range from aggressively pulling a person away, fists up, to more subtle methods, like drawing the person into a circle of friends on the dance floor. (Football player, Daniel Rowe, prefers a bait-and-switch, telling his teammate, “You know she doesn’t want to talk to you, but there’s this other girl downstairs who really likes you,” even though the second girl is nowhere to be found.) At the end of the session, students fill out an evaluation form that asks them to name specific ways to intervene.
Like the One in Four men’s program at the University of Virginia, the ultimate goal of the training program is to create an environment where perpetrating violence against another community member is socially unacceptable. Undergraduate leaders report that students feel fiercely involved in the cause. “Young adults today don’t want their generation keeping quiet about the pain and horror of [sexual violence]…We want to make it more comfortable to speak out,” says Emily Counts, a sophomore who chairs the Student Senate’s Health and Wellness Committee. Stickers created by SHARPP bearing the simple message, “You Can Help,” now adorn refrigerator doors, corkboards, backpacks and laptops. “There’s so many ways of being a bystander,” Ryan Grogan, a senior history major who works with SHARPP, tells students. “If you let it happen, you’re part of the problem.”
The efforts of upperclassmen like Grogan and Cameron Cook, current student body president who ran on a platform of combating rape and a certified peer educator himself, are particularly valuable to incoming freshmen, whose lack of social capital may deter them from intervening as they’re still trying to adjust to college. You’re basically “asking them to act differently from the crowd when they are trying to fit in and make friends,” Banyard says. Still, training new students early is essential, since some research suggests rape is most likely to occur during the first months of school, a period of time known as the “Red Zone,” when drinking is especially heavy on campuses. During the first two weeks of school, there’s a lot of girls who are “very vulnerable and make very poor decisions,” says Counts. With UNH’s “You Can Help” program, workshops during orientation and consistent messaging give clear actions to new students.
That messaging, however, hasn’t been rigorously tested in the same way Bringing in the Bystander has, but its broader meaning clearly resonates, says Cook. “I think the message is simply to teach everybody in the community to stand up for each other in whatever way possible. Not just with sexual assault, but with other violations as well,” he explains. But while it reinforces the idea that students have the power to help each other, SHARPP’s “You Can Help” doesn’t require students to practice specific techniques to prevent a sexual assault, nor does it experimentally test its effectiveness. The lack of evidence-based training might seem okay for a campus that’s already a White House-recognized model for the rest of the country: one might think, there’s no need to educate students on establishing a safer environment when those norms already exist. But harping on sexual assault without those tangible results that Bringing in the Bystander emphasizes risks making consent workshops seem like a lecture or a joke.
The campus leaders that NationSwell interviewed didn’t treat the subject of sexual assault lightly, but only one student could actually point to a time when he and a few friends had personally intervened by separating a “definitely intoxicated” girl from a group of guys and walking her home. “What happened was the best-case scenario: the young lady was walked home, and that was the end of her night,” explains Justin Poisson, a sophomore fraternity member who staffs SHARPP’s hotline. Others share secondhand stories, like inviting someone in trouble to get pizza or a male friend saying, “Babe, let’s go,” to imply they’re dating. Still, even if those students haven’t personally stood up to anyone, they say there’s a stronger sense of community on campus when it feels like someone has your back. Campus climate surveys, following up on the original 1988 questionnaire, appear to demonstrate progress too: by 2012, self-reported victimization rates had been halved in every category, for both men and women.
Nationwide, focusing on prevention has made a recent resurgence in college dorms. (It briefly fell out of fashion as a solution to campus rape, partially because so much attention from the media and policymakers focused on victims’ horrific stories of rape and accused perpetrators’ demands for a fair hearing, Stapleton says.) And soon, to stay in compliance with Title IX and the Campus SaVE Act, all universities will need to formulate broader responses that include prevention to the rapes occurring on their campus. It’s up to them. Will they do enough to barely stay in compliance? Or will they implement a more robust bystander intervention program (like the one at UNH) that changes how students interact with each other?
By giving sexual assault the attention it deserved, the University of New Hampshire became an undisputed leader. Everyone else has a lot of catching up to do.
MORE: Can a College That’s Notorious for Sexual Assault Reform Itself?
The Earth-Friendly Second Life of Dorm Cast-Offs
“Pomp and Circumstance” accompanies the annual spring rites of commencement, as thousands of bright-eyed college graduates depart for the real world. Another, less memorable (and certainly more environmentally-damaging) tradition usually follows immediately after: the dumping of four years’ worth of Ikea futons, mini-fridges, Greek life t-shirts and dog-eared textbooks — items that’ll be purchased by the cartload by incoming freshman next fall.
Undergraduate move-out day generates tons of waste. Student activists on these three college campuses created more efficient systems to reuse and recycle.
University of New Hampshire
The first student-run sustainability initiative of its kind in the country, Trash2Treasure at this college in Durham, N.H., makes storage easier for on-campus students who have limited options for where to stash their furniture over the summer; in the process, they diverted 110 tons from dumpsters. Unwanted items are picked up at the end of each academic year, then sold to newcomers in the fall. It’s profitable enough as a business model that it actually generates more money than it spends to operate — earning $55,000 in revenue for future initiatives, as well as saving the school $10,000 in cleanup costs and parents more than $200,000 on dorm furnishings.
“Thousands of reusable items clog up streets and sidewalks and are sent to landfills every year,” Alex Freid, a UNH student who co-created T2T, tells The Boston Globe. “This is a problem campuses, towns, and cities have been seeing for 20 or 30 years, so they love to see students taking initiative and solving the problem.” Freid now runs the Post-Landfill Action Network, a nonprofit bringing the methods they refined at UNH to other campuses like University of Massachusetts, Tulane University in New Orleans, Northeastern and the College of William and Mary. “Our goal is to help campuses achieve zero waste, and move-out waste is a really great way to start,” Freid adds. “What we’re trying to do is to build universities as microcosms of how the world can and should function in the future.”
Yale University
A decade ago, this Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn., began the annual “Spring Salvage.” The program is based on a simple concept: “All students have to do is look for the blue and gray donation bins as they move out,” says Gabriel Roy-Liguori, a rising senior who helps coordinate the collection. “Blue bins are for soft items” — clothes, shoes, towels, sheets — “gray ones are for hard items” — books, lamps, electronics. There’s some mild confusion every year with a handful of students who think the 150 collection bins are meant for trash, but for the most part, the initiative salvages plenty of perfectly good items. Last year, more than 60,000 pounds of items were donated to Goodwill Industries. Overall, waste declined from 101 tons in 2013 to 93 tons last year, and a greater percentage went to charity instead of the landfill.
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Arizona State University
At the largest campus in the country, students on five campuses around Phoenix diverted 156,860 pounds of waste by redirecting it to charity, repurposing it for next year’s students or recycling it. The “Ditch the Dumpster” campaign works similar to other salvage programs, but at a huge scale. “When 9,000 students leave campus in the course of a week, you have to be on top of your game,” says Elizabeth Kather, a former member of the Sun Devils’ program. “You need a dedicated team — one that can be nimble as things change and react quickly to the needs of the program.” With this year’s move-out program, which launched on Earth Day, they’re hoping to exceed last year’s total, breaking past 78 tons.
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The Challenges Facing Military Families are Unique, So This Program Gives Social Workers Specific Training
The suicide rate among veterans standing at an alarming 22 deaths each day. As if that’s not enough, military families also face the challenges of high unemployment, debt and PTSD.
So the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work decided to create a Master’s program that would train graduate students to address the needs of veterans, service members and military families.
Social workers are often on the front lines when service members return home — diagnosing their problems and helping vets find housing, jobs and stability. Part of the USC program’s emphasis is in training students how to deliver effective therapy that doesn’t drive military members and their spouses away, a problem with some counseling that results in veterans failing to get the help they need. But in the USC program, a concept called the Motivational Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) teaches students how to effectively manage that vital first contact with both service members and veterans.
Many of the students that have enrolled in USC’s program since its inception in 2009 have direct experience with the military themselves — either as soldiers themselves or spouses of deployed military.
Pamela and Mark Mischel recently helped endow a new scholarship program, the Yellow Ribbon Scholarship Fund, which will pay the tuition for military members and vets who want to enroll. “These young men and women have given so much, and we want to do our small part to be able to help,” Mark Mischel tells USC News.
Pamela says that when they learned that many veterans and their spouses were interested in enrolling USC’s military social work program, they decided to help. “If these people wanted to become social workers, then we wanted to help them do that,” she says. “This is our small way of giving back to them for the services they’ve done for our country.”
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicides
When Death or Disability Threatens the Possibility of Attending College, This Organization Steps In
With the start of the new school year, many high school seniors are taking those first steps towards college. Between attending SAT prep classes, taking the actual SAT, making college visits and doing general schoolwork, many are also thinking about the looming stress of financial aid.
And while college is hard enough to afford for most families, affordability is an even bigger problem for the children of deceased or wounded veterans. As of January 2014, 85 percent of the more than 1.4 million children of deceased or wounded veterans weren’t eligible for federal financial assistance.
That’s where Folds of Honor steps in. Since 2007, this nonprofit has been offering scholarships to children of disabled or deceased service members. All children in such families are guaranteed a scholarship — no matter the number or cost.
This all started back when Major Dan Rooney attended the funeral of one of his fellow servicemen, Corporal Brock Burkin. As the family received the body of Burkin, Rooney saw their grief and suffering, along with a void that needed to be filled. So, in between his second and third tours in Iraq, he started Folds of Honor, with Burkin’s son, Jacob, as the first recipient.
The organization has only grown from there. In its seven years of existence, Folds of Honor has granted 7,500 scholarships. In 2014 alone, 2,050 awards totaling $10 million were given.
In addition to being a former F-16 pilot with the Oklahoma Air National Guard, Rooney is also a PGA professional and USGA member. Due to these connections, Folds of Honor tees off across the country to fundraise. Thanks to a partnership with the PGA and USGA, an annual Patriots Golf Day tournament is held every year.
Throughout Labor Day weekend, golfers can add an extra dollar to their green fees that will be donated straight to the nonprofit. With 5,200 golf courses registered across the country, there are ample opportunities to participate.
And what a lucrative endeavor it is. In 2013, $5 million was raised for the organization during the weekend.
While Folds of Honor can’t replace the loss of these families, it can at least provide the children with an opportunity for a better life.
For Kylie Nemecek whose dreams of attending USC were threatened, Folds of Honor is making them a reality.
“Without it I probably wouldn’t be where I am today fulfilling my dream and forever I’ll be grateful for that,” Nemecek tells WLTX 19.
MORE: A Small Island That Makes a Big Difference for America’s Veterans
Which College is Right for You?
There are thousands of community colleges, state colleges and universities all over the country. How does a high school student know which one is the right one for them?
For every high school senior who’s dead-set on becoming, say, a UCLA Bruin after graduation, there’s another who has no idea where on earth to spend the next two or four years.
The new website, Admittedly, is out to help students find a little bit of clarity. Described as an OKCupid for college, the site acts like an personal online college counselor.
In fact, founder and former private college admissions counselor Jessica Brondo started her site last year because she was concerned about the average ratio of high schoolers to college counselors (476 to 1), which makes difficult for kids to get the personal attention they need when it comes to this important decision, TechCrunch writes.
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Here’s how it works: After answering a bunch of short questions, the site matches students with colleges that are in line with their personality, academic and extracurricular interests.
It also categorizes schools into reach, target, and safer categories based on a user’s high school resume.
Users can also take the information from the site to plan visits to these institutions, plus it has tips to improve those crucial college applications, too. Admittedly — which just secured $1.2 million in funding — is currently a free service.
Admittedly is a definite boon to students who want to go to college but don’t have access to high quality counselors and can’t afford campus visits . As we previously reported, a large majority of high-achieving, low-income students don’t apply to selective colleges or universities because they simply don’t know about the opportunities out there (application waivers, financial aid, scholarships, grants) to help them in the college process.
Turns out, choosing the right college doesn’t have to be such a painful process after all.
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How a Two-Week Bootcamp is Getting Vets Ready for Higher Learning
In 2008, Chris Howell began thinking of life after the military. He was serving in the Australian Army, Special Operations Command and was eager to head back to school, reinforced by some timely advice from his younger brother, David. “He said to me, ‘look, you can blow in a door and attack a room, but you need to learn how to read and write an essay.'” David, a top student at Sydney University at the time, took it one step further, putting together a crash-course of materials to help Chris prepare for college life. Five years later, this informal boot-camp became the basis of the Warrior-Scholar Project.
In 2012, Chris Howell partnered with Jesse Reisling and launched the project from Yale, offering a two-week intensive bootcamp for veterans returning to school. In addition to offering classes at Yale this year, they were also available at Harvard and the University of Michigan. By next year, the group plans to hold classes on 10 campuses.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Jesse Reising, founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has become a NationSwell Council member.